India might be the world’s fastest-growing large economy right now—or the country’s statisticians might have miscounted.

On Tuesday, the agency in charge of the computation offered details about why, after changing the way it estimates gross domestic product last month, it now believes economic output will expand by 7.4% in the year ending in March. At 7.5%, India’s revised growth estimate for the fourth quarter of last year beat China’s 7.3%.

The growth boost, the Central Statistics Office said in a 10-page document, is partly due to better measurement of manufacturing activity, made possible by a new database of corporate balance sheets.

The statistics office also explained why the Indian economy was a lot smaller a few years ago than previously estimated. Activity by small retailers and wholesalers had been overstated, the document said, “by a very large margin.”

T.C.A. Anant, India’s chief statistician, said the new figures for gross domestic product offer a more accurate picture of economic activity in the world’s second-most-populous country. “There is a lot of modernization which is happening,” he said. Read More »

Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan listens to a question during a news conference at the RBI headquarters in Mumbai.

Punit Paranjpe/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

India’s statistics ministry dropped a bombshell revision of recent GDP data Friday evening, provoking some head-scratching among economists trying to make sense of the incredible (in both senses of the word) new numbers. Growth of 6.9% in the 2014 fiscal year instead of 4.7%! Read More »

“What Young India Wants” is the title of blockbuster author Chetan Bhagat’s 2012 collection of essays and newspaper columns. Mr. Bhagat isn’t concerned that Young India is too vast, varied, rural, poor and non-English-speaking for its aspirations to be easily captured in his novels about engineers and call-center employees. Read More »

The chief economic adviser to India’s government said he fears America’s longstanding commitment to globalization and the free movement of goods and people is in doubt, and that the shift in attitudes menaces the growth and development of poor countries including India. Read More »

The Columbia economist’s academic career contains some clues about the sort of advice he’ll provide at the helm of NITI Aayog, the new institution that replaces India’s Soviet-inspired Planning Commission. Read More »

An onion vendor read a newspaper at his stall, at a wholesale vegetable market in Kolkata on July 9.

Associated Press

The latest reading on India’s wholesale-price index is a big, fat, dramatic-looking zero. It’s some small vindication for the country’s central bank, which has refused to loosen lending conditions until price rises are firmly tamed. But it’s also a scary-seeming echo of the deflationary rumbles that are currently spooking policy makers in advanced economies. Read More »

Women’s empowerment hasn’t featured prominently so far in Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s program for economic revival. It probably should, according to the latest overview of the Indian economy by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Read More »

After last week’s massive blizzard stranded one of Nadav Ben Yehuda’s countrymen alone on a ridge near Mount Everest, the Israeli mountaineer set out with little more than a satellite phone and a map marked with some locations where the trapped climber might be. Read More »

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India Real Time offers analysis and insights into the broad range of developments in business, markets, the economy, politics, culture, sports, and entertainment that take place every single day in the world’s largest democracy. Regular posts from Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires reporters around the country provide a unique take on the main stories in the news, shed light on what else mattered and why, and give global readers a snapshot of what Indians have been talking about all week. You can contact the editors at indiarealtime(at)wsj(dot)com.